Many contractors go to customer facilities to perform services. For example, customers in the refinery, petrochemical, paper, steel, pharmaceutical, food, and automotive industries often contract with an outside firm for the contractor to come perform maintenance, repairs, construction, inspection, and related services at facilities such as factories, plants, oil fields, or other installations. Typically, a contract may identify certain amounts of time or materials that the contractor may expend performing the service. A contract may even specify allowed times or materials for a specific contractor. For example, a given contractor may be allowed to bill out up to 4 hours for a given pipe cleaning and to use up to 50′ of hose at the customer's expense. After the service visit, the contractor will send an invoice billing for the expended time and materials. Some customers track these values in their own internal contract management programs.
Contractor firms may send their invoice from administrative offices that are not necessarily located near the site of service. For the administrator to prepare the invoice, he typically relies on the technician who performed the service to report the amounts of materials and time spent at the facility. For example, a technician may write up a shift ticket recording that a particular pipe-cleaning job required five hours and 100′ of hose.
Problems arise at multiple levels. Technicians do not always accurately record their time. Obviously, this can damage the relationship between customer and contractor if, for example, a technician overbills. If the technician spends an hour on-site, and the bill is for two hours, the contractor may end up spending more time resolving the dispute than the entire service visit was worth. But more subtly, if the quantities on the shift ticket do not conform to the expectations of the parties, they may be handled inconsistently. Some administrators may write the bills down to an approved quantity, not knowing that overtime is approved. Some technicians may habitually round their time to the nearest hour, even if the result is that they consistently round down (e.g., every 8.5 hour day is written down as an 8 hour day). At another level, administrators introduce human error when they manually reconcile the shift tickets with reports from the customer's software. For a contractor to track services accurately and prepare invoices that conform with policies of the contractor and the customer requires administrative personnel to spend large amounts of time carefully inspecting all of the incoming information.